New efforts!

[ivanhedgehog]

It's much more likely that a reporter would have miscounted, omitted a few interruptions, exaggerated, or deliberately misreported their results than an astronomically unlikely streak actually occurred.

I think the possibilities the RNG in use has serious issues or is being misused by the programmer are somewhere in-between.

the person that had the 123 string of failures at 20% was my wife, I was watching as she did it. no omissions etc. bioware has an awful track record of buggy software that should have been caught in testing but wasnt actually tested.

[Magus Prime]

Speaking of glitches and bugs, I was in AE and selected a mission at random and the holographic contacts popped up looking like this:

https://imgur.com/1ujP9Tm
https://imgur.com/J1eVY6M
https://imgur.com/36K1PK4

Not sure if it was a bug or if a mod was trolling me.

[AmberOfDzu]

the person that had the 123 string of failures at 20% was my wife, I was watching as she did it. no omissions etc. bioware has an awful track record of buggy software that should have been caught in testing but wasnt actually tested.

How do you get them to take your claim seriously? Telling them they have an awful track record with bugs and testing, and therefore they should check into this isn't going to get very far. Can you offer them log files, or a video of it happening? How about step by steps instructions to replicate it? Your word alone won't be enough.

[CrimsonCapacitor]

FreeBSD committers care very much about both correctness and having a clean and well-engineered architecture. That's why BSD > Linux.  ;D

Blue Screen of Death > Linux? 

Dude, harsh.

[AmberOfDzu]

When I was a first year graduate student, I was in introductory class in probability and statistics. It was introductory at the graduate level, so not a trivial course at all. There were about fifty students in it, mostly from a variety of technical disciplines; science, engineering, etc., and overall it was a bright group.

On the first day, after going over the syllabus the professor did an experiment with the class.

He wrote numbers on the blackboard: "1 2 3 4".

He then asked all of us to choose one of the four numbers at random, and to write it down in our notes.

We then went through some basic discussions and definitions of terms and so forth.

He finished the class by declaring to us that were were very poor judges of what was random, and to prove it, he asked for us to raise our hands if we had chosen each of the numbers as he pointed to them in turn.

Almost everyone in the class had chosen the same number. Can you guess which it was?

[Pengy]

Start at the left. Eliminate the 1 because obviously it's less random due to some Bayesian nonsense. Go to the opposite end. Eliminate the 4 for the same reason. Now backtrack almost, but not quite, to the middle.

The correct answer is 3. Guaranteed random.

Almost everyone in the class had chosen the same number. Can you guess which it was?

[Arcana]

FreeBSD committers care very much about both correctness and having a clean and well-engineered architecture. That's why BSD > Linux.  ;D

When it comes to things for which I want maximum flexibility, I deploy on Linux.  When I want to deploy something for which I want maximum availability, I deploy on FreeBSD.

[Arcana]

Start at the left. Eliminate the 1 because obviously it's less random due to some Bayesian nonsense. Go to the opposite end. Eliminate the 4 for the same reason. Now backtrack almost, but not quite, to the middle.

The correct answer is 3. Guaranteed random.

When asked to pick a random number people are more likely to pick odd numbers than even ones.  Had the professor asked his class to pick a random number from the list 2, 3, 4, 5, the most common selection would have still been 3.

There are a lot of ways people do not understand true randomness that can be exposed in this way.  Ask a group of people to select a random number from one to one hundred and write it down.  Then do that again.  Then again, twelve times total.  Odds are, exactly no one in that group will duplicate a number.  In fact, its actually more likely that a randomly generated list like that duplicates a number than doesn't.

[AmberOfDzu]

When asked to pick a random number people are more likely to pick odd numbers than even ones.  Had the professor asked his class to pick a random number from the list 2, 3, 4, 5, the most common selection would have still been 3.

The rationale we agreed on at the time is that the numbers at either end are visual extremes, and would not be seen as random for that reason. Of the two numbers left, 2 & 3,  2 is even and 3 is odd, and odd numbers are thought of as more random than even ones; so most people chose 3; in our case, all but a handful out of the whole room.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Speaking of glitches and bugs, I was in AE and selected a mission at random and the holographic contacts popped up looking like this:

https://imgur.com/1ujP9Tm
https://imgur.com/J1eVY6M
https://imgur.com/36K1PK4

Not sure if it was a bug or if a mod was trolling me.

At the moment i see three broken image icons. If i open each in a new tab the image is visible. Does that mean a mod is trolling me?

[AmberOfDzu]

At the moment i see three broken image icons. If i open each in a new tab the image is visible. Does that mean a mod is trolling me?

I think the image links would work if the imgur paths in the img links had the .jpg file extensions included, like this:

Speaking of glitches and bugs, I was in AE and selected a mission at random and the holographic contacts popped up looking like this:

https://imgur.com/1ujP9Tm.jpg
https://imgur.com/J1eVY6M.jpg
https://imgur.com/36K1PK4.jpg

Not sure if it was a bug or if a mod was trolling me.

Did this work right?

[Taceus Jiwede]

Also, how was this not a thing back when the game was running I'll never know:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClYoiv338Uk

I can only imagine the disbelief that person felt when they got 1 shot by pure chance - their jaw must of touched the ground.

Likewise the disbelief of the person who drew the card was probably equally as hilarious although I presume there was more maniacal laughter involved.

The rationale we agreed on at the time is that the numbers at either end are visual extremes, and would not be seen as random for that reason. Of the two numbers left, 2 & 3,  2 is even and 3 is odd, and odd numbers are thought of as more random than even ones; so most people chose 3; in our case, all but a handful out of the whole room.

I use to do something similar as a lame party trick.  Ask a person to pick a number between 5-12 they generally will pick 7, of course not everyone does but enough people do.

[LadyVamp]

When it comes to things for which I want maximum flexibility, I deploy on Linux.  When I want to deploy something for which I want maximum availability, I deploy on FreeBSD.

I'd consider doing that, but I use esxi 6 as well as kvm on proxmox (debian under the hood) which ends up being linux under the hood.  Yes I know esxi 6 isn't a true linux kernel, but it's close enough.

Besides I've found OmniOS to be smoother sailing for me than FreeBSD.  Oh and FreeBSD appears to be dropping jails and going with docker containers.  So much for availability and reliability.

[LaughingAlex]

Also, how was this not a thing back when the game was running I'll never know:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClYoiv338Uk

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
AHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHA*Nearly dies of laughter*!

[ivanhedgehog]

How do you get them to take your claim seriously? Telling them they have an awful track record with bugs and testing, and therefore they should check into this isn't going to get very far. Can you offer them log files, or a video of it happening? How about step by steps instructions to replicate it? Your word alone won't be enough.

you dont tell them that. diplomacy is not calling someone a dumbass when they are one

[Arcana]

Oh and FreeBSD appears to be dropping jails and going with docker containers.  So much for availability and reliability.

Err.  I'm not an authority on FreeBSD core development, but that seems to be a non-sequitur.  Docker - or more specifically libcontainer - is (as far as I'm aware) implemented on FreeBSD using jails.  Since jails are a necessary OS component for Docker implementation on FreeBSD, I don't see how FreeBSD can drop support for jails.  So I'm not sure what you mean when you say FreeBSD appears to be dropping jails.

Also, Docker support is still experimental (because of the 64-bit binary compatibility module stuff mostly) and I see no great rush to abandon jails in any FreeBSD haunt I wander through.

I'm not all that familiar with OmniOS.  It sounds very much like SmartOS which I'm somewhat more familiar with.  What would you say are the most significant distinctions between those two IllumOS children?

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Did this work right?

Yep. Darn those darn mods to heck.  :'(

[AmberOfDzu]

Yep. Darn those darn mods to heck.  :'(

Woohoo! I was able to help out somehow!   :D

[Yoru-hime]

The second problem is probably THE single most pernicious problem in all of programming.  Someone wrote the aggro code for Asheron's Call.  They ran it.  It didn't crash.  It never generated an invalid result.  The game always worked with it.  Ergo, it must be okay.  That's how that bug persisted for as long as it did.  City of Heroes had those kinds of bugs-a-plenty.  The presumption a lot of programmers operate on either explicitly or implicitly is that if their code doesn't kill the program, its probably okay.  Much of iterative programming implicitly follows this rule.  Keep editing the code until it compiles, then keep editing until it runs, then keep editing until it generates a sane result, then you're done.  No one checks for correctness these days.

This one drives me up a wall, but it feels like it's everywhere. It feels like every bit of code I inherit these days has been "tested" by seeing if it gives the expected results for one sample input (usually the most straightforward and trivial case there is), and once it does, someone marked it done and forgot it. I think I just about floored one guy earlier this week by giving him six different test sets for one problem, three of which I told him I expected to fail (but he had to make the system fail gracefully). I should probably check in on him at some point and see if the shock has worn off.

[AmberOfDzu]

This one drives me up a wall, but it feels like it's everywhere. It feels like every bit of code I inherit these days has been "tested" by seeing if it gives the expected results for one sample input (usually the most straightforward and trivial case there is), and once it does, someone marked it done and forgot it. I think I just about floored one guy earlier this week by giving him six different test sets for one problem, three of which I told him I expected to fail (but he had to make the system fail gracefully). I should probably check in on him at some point and see if the shock has worn off.

Testing is dull and boring; and slows the schedule down.

I hate it too, but I hate trying to fix something I wrote years ago. The best time to find and fix problems is immediately when a system is being designed and implemented. When schedule or resources make me shortchange testing thoroughly, I know I'm going to pay that price later, and multiplied over. Or someone will.

And please, leave your test and debugging instrumentation in the final code base.